


The Sighted

by RozQrtz (izzyMC)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: AGRESSIVELY flirty Chan, AU where they are all wizards with a specialty, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Changjin centric, Conspiracy, Enemies to Lovers, Fighting against the man, Gradual Romance, Hella sweet and protective Changbin, Hyunjin is the main-ish character, Jilix being really really cute ahhh, M/M, Mentions of blood and other wounds, Plant Boi and Potions Bio Minho, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Tags to be added, depictions of violence, split narrative
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29988030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/izzyMC/pseuds/RozQrtz
Summary: After a life stolen from him, Hyunjin can see more than most. From the slightest touch of his fingertips, a world of power surges--but it is also his greatest curse. From the kindness of a stranger, can he learn to live his life once more?Chan loathes a life without thrill. In darkened alleyways and pits with bloodied knuckles, his power is his greatest strength. Chan lusts for that which is forbidden and outlawed--a stark contrast to the man which he owes his life.Light and darkness, two lives intertwined. They chase shadows and sunbeams together for as long as they'll live. Two outcasts, Jisung and Felix run from those who would seek to snuff them out.aka my self-indulgent wizard au ;)
Relationships: Bang Chan/Lee Minho | Lee Know, Han Jisung | Han/Lee Felix, Hwang Hyunjin/Seo Changbin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	The Sighted

**Author's Note:**

> here i come to emerge from the ashes with a new story lollll my AO3 hiatus really took a lot longer than I had intended, but I've been thinking of this idea recently and I can't get it out of my head!! Thank you so much for reading!! Shoutout to my lovely friend @YfwbbS to listening to my rambles about this fic and giving it a shot for me too!! <3 
> 
> to be honest this fic is me obsessing over sexy wizard bois and being unchained with Changjin hehe 
> 
> CWs: blood, wounds, implication of human torture, implications of physical and magical violence, mentions of s*icidal thoughts

It was a cold and dark room. The kind of unforgiving place where wretched people came to die in the silence of their own demons.

Time was something that he hadn’t the pleasure of knowing for these past few....however long he had been there. The only thing separating his days there was the tiny sliver of window near his ceiling. Day was bright. Night was darker.

A million screaming voices echoed in his head. They were a horrible cacophony of desperate souls reaching out for someone to hear them. Even though his room was made of stone, no walls could keep him from hearing their cries.

He pulled his knees up into his chest to hold them here. There had been a time once when his mother had told him to do so to make it all go away.

“Hold yourself close. Pretend that it’s me. Close your eyes, focus on my voice only…”

He hated crying. Not because he felt as if it made him pathetic, but because it was so exhausting. These days, he barely had enough energy to rise to his feet.

“Read the room.” Their voices would command. “See the room. What is that you see? Who is he? What can he do? Touch him. Show us what you can do.”

“But I don’t want to…” His voice cracked in return.

_Please. Just let them stop. Let the voices stop. Let me die. If that’s what it takes..._

It was a cold and dark room, and he shivered. Any time now they would come back in.

The heavy and metallic door clanged with the sound of the hinges scraping against their rusty edges. He readied his wrists for them to take. His twitching fingers had gotten used to it now. They were no longer his; no longer his own property. They had been kidnapped and stolen. Their own harsh fingers would wrap around his arms to bring him to his feet. They had bruised him once accidentally--or maybe it wasn’t as much of an accident as he had thought.

“Come with me. Quietly. Don’t make a sound.”

He looked up through this blurry sheen to make out the features of a man whom he had seen before. He was one of the quieter ones. The ones that would stand at the edge of the room. He was one that would nod when they called his name with a clipboard held to his chest. They had brought in a man once who could bend metal with his mind. He had never known anyone with that power before. They forced his hand onto the man’s arm, and it was as if he could taste the iron in his mouth. He didn’t know what to do, but merely felt the anger and frisson of every atom in the room. He snapped the table in half, and it splintered and cut the fragile skin of everyone in the room. He accidentally sliced open his hand, and that man at the edge of the room held him with the red liquid mixing between their fingers.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“Are you alright?” He asked now too.

Dark hair swept up in sweat dipped over his even darker eyes. “We don’t have long before they notice.”

His trembling knees barely allowed him the strength to stand, but the other man's calloused and strong hands brought him up.

“I’ll explain later.”

The hallways were also cold and dark. As if a place such as this could hold a shred of warmth--it was impossible.

The other man had bruises on his knuckles, and they cracked with blood where he held him on his left arm. He wondered what this stranger must’ve done to get this far. The two of them scuttled down the cement walkways, to a set of doors locked with a card scanner. The man whipped his head around, then pulled the white card out of his pocket that was stained with bloody fingerprints.

An echoing voice called after them down the hall. “Magistrate!! His removal wasn’t ordered!!”

_We need to run. We have to get out. They know. They can’t kill him. They can’t afford it. They’ll kill me. Who am I to them?_

He hadn’t noticed it until now, but where the other man held him, his bare arm shivered and poked with goosebumps. _He was touching him._

The man squeezed his eyes shut, then with all his might, he called out to the other official with a clear voice, “You don’t see anything. Go back to your post. I’m heading out for the day. You saw me leave, and then you returned to your post.”

The two escapees turned to watch the official’s face fall blank with empty opal colored eyes.

“I saw you leave, now I’m going to return to my post.” He said with a dead expression.

“How did you--”

The tortured soul had been used to hearing voices before, but not like this. He could _feel_ them.

“You’re a telepath aren’t you?” He asked his rescuer.

The man gritted his teeth. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like people touching you, but I had to get you out of this...hell. We’re almost there. I’ve arranged for a car to pick us up out back.”

“Why are you helping me?”

The man stammered, and with the slightest brush, he had rubbed his thumb into the other’s arm.

“I-I don’t know. I couldn’t just watch it all happen. You’re dying in here. No one deserves that...Hyunjin. That’s your name right?”

He had almost forgotten his name after being called a number for so long. Hearing his name was like hearing the voice of an old friend whom he had known fondly. Having no name made him less than a person. He might as well have been in this horrid place.

“Y-yes. That’s my name.”

Another set of metal doors swung open, and with them the flooding light of day encapsulated his whole form. He hadn’t felt sunlight in...however long it had been. In the full view of the sun he was able to see his rescuer: a handsome and younger man who had striking eyes that looked to be strained with exhaustion.

“Your name is Changbin?”

The man looked surprised for a moment, but then understood, carefully removing his hand from Hyunjin’s arm.

“Yes. You could see me couldn’t you? _The Sight_ told you?”

“Yes...I’m sorry, I can’t control it.”

A black sedan came whipping around the corner with jet black windows reflecting the white light of the area. Everything around there was industrial and filthy, and gated in tall wire fences lined with barbed wire. Hyunjin had wondered what it had looked like, but he had never expected to find out.

“It's okay.” Changbin returned with somewhat of a small smile. “We’re almost free of this place. You’ll never see these walls again. I promise.”

Hyunjin knew that when it came to him, there were no promises that the other man could make. By them stepping into that car, it would be the first of many paces that he would need to take to run as far as he could--and they would be chasing him every step of the way.

“You can’t say that.”

“Hm. Must’ve worn off. I was saying that to make you feel better. I know that I can’t. Get in the car.”

Hyunjin didn’t make out the features of the driver, but he could make out the way that the skyline beyond the complex and the long grey river that stretched under the bridge that they took to enter the city. He had once called that city--his sector--home. He wondered if his home was even still there, or if they had destroyed it like they had with his mother. She was the kind of woman who could make red sparks dance on her fingertips. She never did end up telling him what her power really was, but he knew that she had used it for good somehow.

Snow fell from the sky, or ash. The white flakes fell silently and irregularly, but it was beautiful.

“Here. I don’t know if this will help, but I got you these.”

Changbin pulled out from his pocket a pair of black leather gloves.

“I think maybe if you wear them then you can touch people and then it won’t be as much of a shock?”

He slipped on the tight fabric, then twisted his fingers around to see how they filled the leather up.

“...Thank you.”

“Try it out.” His rescuer held up his hand, still pink, still bloodied.

Hyunjin raised his hand to touch the other’s. Once they met, he could feel nothing, but rather an empty and barren shadow. The absence of feeling was something that he didn’t know that he had craved so harshly.

“You don’t feel anything? No thoughts?”

“No…”

“Here.” Changbin patted his shoulder. “Get some rest. You must be exhausted. You don't have to be scared of me. I promise…I mean it this time.”

Tentatively, Hyunjin bowed his head down to the torn fabric of the man’s suit coat. This man wasn’t cold, or dark. He should’ve been on his guard, but after so long, he let it slip away just for a moment’s rest.

Changbin sighed out with his relief, then hummed some kind of tune that sounded forign and melodic.

“Close your eyes. I’ll make sure that you have a good dream.”

╚═══*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*═══╝

“Got anything good for me? Something to take the edge off?”

Minho’s most frequent customer perused around the shop, touching things that he probably shouldn’t have been touching.

“You break something and I’ll kill you.”

“Oooh is that a threat or a promise? I’d love to see you try; ‘would be interesting. You gonna wrap vines around me or something and choke me to death? Wow! What a scary way to go!”

“If you’ve just come here to be sarcastic, I’d love that you leave and do that somewhere else. You’re wasting my time.”

“Ahhh you love having me here. You and I both know that you’re bored out of your mind here.”

“ _Only you_ can see a place such as this and think that it’s not amusing. Neanderthal.” Minho tutted, then crossed the shop to take a couple dry ingredients out of the shelves on the opposite side of the room. With the number of orders that he had to fill, he wished that the other man would just _leave._

It was much too nice of a day for this nuisance to plague his shop. The longer he stayed, the longer that Minho felt as if his shop was becoming less of a respectable place. That...brute, slung his body up to sit on the wooden front counter top with the swinging legs of a toddler. Per usual, scrapes and burns tattered his arms. Contrary to what that man would’ve thought, no, they did not make him look like some kind of rapscallion-hero. They made him look foolish. Clad in leather, he was the kind of man to stick a toothpick in his teeth and swirl bits of steam between his fingers because he thought this must’ve been some way to show off. His white teeth would glint with a smile, and he’d scoff to himself for no reason at all. Minho had come to loathe that this man had thought that purely being amused was a personality trait.

“You look dashing today.” The customer said. “I guess I should be thankful for the fact that your pretty hands don’t have to touch anything other than all these...green things.”

"These “pretty hands” have saved your life on more than one occasion. Don’t you forget.”

Minho’s tabby and white cat leapt up to peep out of the front display window. It tangled it’s tail with the ivy creeping up the windowsill and brushed his fluffy face against the display of purple flowers of Vervain reaching their stems to kiss the sun with greedy petals.

“I’ve said thank you before. Do you need me to say it again?”

Minho rolled his eyes bemused, finally gathering the materials to make his concoctions after several minutes of this distraction.

“Only if you promise to never stumble into my shop again with your arm nearly spliced off.”

The other man winced, then patted down the scar ripping diagonally over his pectoral and bicep under his leather vest.

“Fine. I do really appreciate you for that one. I could’ve died that night."

The shopkeeper brought the dried Chamomile to his mortar and pestle, and crushed the flower without meeting the other’s eyes. “You could’ve died on _many_ nights.”

The intruder slid off the wooden slab, and clicked his boots on the aged beechwood floors. He was charming...if he wasn’t so asinine most of the time, Minho liked to think.

“What’s life without a little danger…?” He ambled to join Minho on the other side of the table. “...without something that’s a little... _forbidden_?”

The cement mortar thumped the wood, and little bits of white specks of flower dotted the surface. “Don’t you even think about doing that in here. Do you have a death wish?”

He chuckled, throwing his hands up to show that he really was as harmless as he had promised. “I would never! Not here. Not to you.”

Minho gritted his teeth. “Chan…”

“Yes, darling?” Chan batted his eyelashes. He picked up a torn piece of paper with a scribbled note on it--likely an order-- in his palm. He whispered a couple incoherent words, then blew into the grey edges of note which folded into the shape of a butterfly and soared out from his hand.

“Don’t you fucking, “darling” me.” The shopkeeper swatted at the other man with a flick of his middle finger to the other’s arm. It made him hiss out--but he deserved it. “Go get that order back. They’ll be here any minute.”

“Oh, It's as good as gone. You think that I can catch something like that?” Chan pointed to the ceiling where the ash-grey butterfly had explored the rafters of the room.

“Then you’re taking the fall for the order when they walk in and I’m not prepared.”

Chan twisted the silver rings around his fingers, then ruffled up his misshapen dark colored hair streaked with red. “That's...my cue to leave.”

“I will skewer you with vines. You joke, but I have it in me.”

The intruder guffawed out with a dry crack to his laugh. While he too was a cynic like the elegant keeper of Sundam Apothecary, Chan knew how to live life as if it was on the tip of his finger. He liked to think that death didn’t scare him, or things that were _forbidden._

“So what you’re saying is…the next time that it’s sparring night, I can place my bets on you?”

Minho added dried Primrose to his dry mixture of flowers reduced to dust under his stone.

“I’d never set foot in that barbaric place. If anything, it would be me dragging you out of there again. If you ever get Snatched, I won’t be so kind. You deserve it.”

Chan sighed out with a dreamy air. It was as if he wanted to get Snatched. Just for the fun of it.

“You keep me on my toes, darling. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” The rebel twisted his finger under the chin of the tabby cat who recoiled at the feeling.

He hung onto the brass handle of the door, lingering as the bells chimed against the glass. Chan looked out to the street first, shrouded in the sunlight of the afternoon. It had been the nicest afternoon in a long while: the kind that permitted a sliver of blue in the sky to grace those below. Other than days like this, Chan had to find his own sunshine in other unconventional places.

Minho returned to his work, closing his eyes to breathe deeply through his nose. He chanted the incantations that he had repeated hundreds of times before. From his fingertips, a type of tingling energy pricked at his skin, and the dry petals started to melt into a multicolored liquid that turned iridescent and let out a beautiful aromatic smell with no real name to it.

“...When are we gonna...admit this thing that we’ve got going on here?” Chan stuck his body halfway between the shop and the stoop outdoors. “You know you love me.”

Minho scoffed with the largest eye roll that he could muster--it even hurt his eyes to do so.

“If “love” means me scraping you off the floor every time that you decide to use spells that you know that are for--”

“--Well, if that’s what it is, can I count on you to scrape me off the floor this coming Thursday?”

The potions master poured the shimmering green liquid into a vial, flicking it to rid it of any bubbles. “Scrape yourself.”

╚═══*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*═══╝

Footsteps bounced off brick walls, and the feet that made them splashed in puddles caught in the holes spotting the path. Their hands were sweating, hot, but they clung onto each other with all of their might.

“HEY! STOP! THIEVES!”

The two young men laughed out hysterically--a task which was a bit hard to do considering that they had sprinted off on full speed. Wisps of dark black smoke followed the pair of panting bodies, and the pawn-trader tripped over his own feet behind them.

“Felix! The lights!” The boy with ripped jeans and a black hoodie urged his partner.

The boy with fluffy blonde hair nodded with a knowing grin, then twisted his hands out to the direction of the streetlights to snuff them out with glowing gold veins surging around his wrists.

“How much farther?!” Felix asked his companion. The other boy said nothing, but merely whispered under his breath with black clouding his irises and black creeping up his neck and covering his fingertips where he held the other boy’s hand.

“Jisung??”

“We’ve almost lost him.” His tone turned sinister, and he pulled the two of them past another corner; the wet sound of rain splattered under their shoes. A humidity hung in the air in these hidden alleyways and got stuck on their heated skin. The urban sprawl, while maze-like, was their home, and the both of them knew it like the back of each other’s hands.

The disgruntled screams of the pawn-trader faded to nothing, and their steps slowed. Somewhere a gutter dripped with droplets of the evening condensation, and they pulled themselves behind two particularly large dumpsters. The wisps of smoke diffused into the air, and the boy with ripped jeans pulled back his hood, and his irises melted from pitch black to brown.

Felix snapped his fingers, and the light flickering in nearby streetlights fizzed away. Instead, the yellow light got caught up between his fingers and danced with a sparkle like pure rays of sunlight webbed on his skin.

At first, they simply doubled over laughing at the thrill of it all.

Jisung beamed widely, then took out the golden artifact from where he had tucked it in his sleeve. The black veins that spiderwebbed onto his face dissolved into his skin. His chest threw itself up and down, then he reached out to hold the face of his companion with fingers still dipped in obsidian.

“Oh my god. We should make out. This is the part where we make out, right?”

“Ummm no.” In the shadow of the alley, Felix's finger put a stop to Jisung’s advancing lips.

His glossy brown eyes pleaded, “Later?”

“Eh. I guess.”

“That was so fucking cool! D-did you see the look on his face?! This...” He rolled over the gold- plated sundial in his hand. “--I think this is the best that we’ve done so far! We’ll be eating well for _weeks_.”

The blonde ruffled up the other boy’s dark hair with a smile that scrunched up his freckled face. “You did a good job.”

“It’s like he didn’t even see me. I think I’m getting pretty good at this _“Lord of Darkness”_ thing.”

Felix swatted him upside the head. “Quit it with that. You Twist shadows. It’s not much more complicated than that.”

“But _“Lord of Darkness”_ sounds cool…”

Felix took the sundial to shove it in his pocket. He knew that he couldn’t rust the other with it even if his life depended on it...which it sort of did. “What does that make me then?”

Jisung pondered the question while tapping his chin with his index in his thoughts.

The blonde snapped his fingers, and the lights returned to the streetlights with a warm glow.

“Lord of...Sunshine?”

“Ha ha. Very cute.”

The dark haired boy puffed up his cheeks in his frustration, then muttered, “Hey, at least I tried…”

Felix swayed his body back and forth, admiring the boy in front of him. Even with sweat caught up and beading on his nose and upper lip, he was just too cute for him to be mad for long.

“I thought that you could’ve thought of something better for your _~soulmate~_ ”

Jisung pretended to retch at the word. “ Gross. Don’t call it that.”

“Hey! I’m just telling it how it is!” Felix winked, then threw his arm around his companion. As they passed down the empty street, rain dripped from the gutters and patted on the cobblestone sidewalks. The two of them walked on, and each streetlight faded, then surged back with a light twice as strong. Jisung held the other boy's hand where it curved around his shoulder, rubbing into his palm slightly.

“We make a pretty good team don’t we?” The self-proclaimed “Lord of Darkness” sighed out, and his breath turned to vapor in front of his face.

“For a couple of Twister _soulmates_? Yeah, I think so.”

Jisung spun out from his arm, stumbling into more of those puddles. “Call it that one more time and make you blind!!”

“Fine! Twister... _partners in crime_?”

The dark haired boy grinned, then took his turn slinging the other boy under his arm. “Yeah...I like that more.”

Mist hung in the air, and the two boy’s gregarious laughter filled the streets and empty shop windows with their partially-dark-partially-light aura.

“Let’s get back and shove our faces with whatever we can buy....and make out.”

Felix smiled, “Hm. Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> *gives huggsss* 
> 
> hehe if you so desire, I am on twt: @QrtzRoz


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